Freeze-drying the dead could help save the planet

"This is going to revolutionise the cremation industry," says Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak; biologist, former chemical plant process technician, wife of renowned Swedish clam breeder and the founder of Promessa, a new and controversial burial process whereby a corpse is placed into a vat of liquid nitrogen, before being broken down with intense vibrations into thousands of millimetre-sized pieces of matter, freeze-dried and buried in a shallow grave.

The process is simple. Within a week and a half after death, the corpse is frozen to minus 18 degrees Celsius and then submerged in liquid nitrogen. This makes the body very brittle and vibration of a specific amplitude transforms it into an organic powder that is then introduced into a vacuum chamber where the water is evaporated away

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Crematoria and conspiracies One of the most important and symbolic gestures that would be lost if Promessa replaces cremation is the scattering of ashes. Wired.co.uk asked if there was any way her new technology could allow for this kind of scattering, but Wiigh-Mäsak was adamant that freeze-dried remains could not be scattered in quite the same way, "You cannot scatter the freeze-dried remains because you are still in an organic form, which means you are not broken down, you are still food for the soil and if you spread it around you will be food for birds, or fish, or whatever. People would stop eating fish if you start spreading that into the ocean."

We assumed it was because it could disrupt the eco-system -- instead it was back to that disavowal problem again, "people might think 'should I eat fish today? What about if I eat dead people?'"

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So if you eat a fish that's eaten organic human remains, you're effectively eating a human? "Yes. I mean, nothing is broken down in the human remains after promession," she explains, adding that she didn't want to "close any doors" so people who wanted to have ashes to scatter could burn the metal-free freeze-dried remains.

One of the most startling things Wired.co.uk learnt about cremation was how the mercury in tooth fillings and the sodium chloride in our bodies can and does poison some members of staff responsible for the burning process in crematoria. They are also forced to rake out the bones after the 90 minute procedure is over, as the bodies often don't completely burn away in that short period of time. Once the bones have been raked, they are put into a machine called a cremulator and crushed into powder, "So what you get is not really ashes in your urn, it is ground bones." Suddenly Promessa is sounding far more appealing.

Wired.co.uk is told that another great advantage of Promessa is the sudden influx of top soil. Now graveyards that were previously full are suddenly empty again thanks to the very shallow graves required for the Promession technique. This is particularly advantageous for overcrowded areas like Mexico City, which are struggling to deal with the remains of their dead.

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A business like this is not cheap to fund and in 12 years Promessa has amassed more than £3.2 million thanks to "Investments, corporations and licences", currently they have licensees in South Korea, South Africa and Europe.

All the tests have been completed thanks to a supply of dead pigs, which were placed in coffins, frozen, physically broken down, dried and buried in the earth with great success. Human testing is still illegal.

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Despite spending a lifetime studying death, Wiigh-Mäsak says she's never once found the topic morbid or depressing, "We don't see the dead body as the final end. Well treated, the body will support something new, life will continue. And that is going to create a totally new relation to death and dying of the body. It also makes it possible to start talking about death."

Death is one of the last few remaining taboos in an increasingly uncensored age, but why this particular mood has always been regnant has never been clear. "I have my own theory," says Wiigh-Mäsak, "I think it's very convenient for the cremation industry to sustain the taboo because then they can work on their own without any questions. If you tell people for 150 years 'This is a very quiet and complicated area, you don't really want to talk about it do you?' then that's probably what people will end up thinking in the end. And everyone I've spoken to over the years said that personally this isn't a hard topic, it's just that someone told them it should be. Taking that burden away from people is a wonderful thing. I had one lady who called me after we spoke once, she was very excited and said "Do you know, everyone has this problem? It could be peace on earth!" There are very few topics where everyone has something in common, but everyone shares the fact that we're all dying."

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It struck Wired.co.uk that the spirit of Promessa had many similarities to the Tibetan sky burial, a funerary practice wherein a human corpse is incised in certain locations and placed on a mountaintop, exposing the body to the elements and animals -- especially predatory birds. There is no need to preserve the body, as it is considered to be an empty vessel. Birds may eat it or it may decompose naturally over time. The function of the sky burial is simply to dispose of the remains in as generous a way as possible. Not only was Wiigh-Mäsak familiar with this, but she had received a letter from an "Indian priest" claiming that they were very interested in learning more about Promessa, as they are currently experiencing an inconvenient shortage of vultures.

Potential burial site after Promession has taken place

Peter Masak

The factory where Promessa's promators are prepared and designed

Peter Masak

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Central heating is people For all their apparent faults, the crematoria in Sweden at least seem to be aware of their ecological carelessness and have devised a novel way to help offset their carbon footprint. The furnaces used to burn the corpses run for 90 minutes at a time and often reach temperatures as high as 800 degrees Celsius. One company intends to use this surplus energy to heat the homes of their neighbouring town. Lennart Andersson, the director of the cemetery in the town of Halmstad told the Telegraph "It was when we were discussing all these environmental issues that we started thinking about the energy that is used in the cremations and realised that instead of all that heat just going up into the air, we could make use of it somehow. It was just rising into the skies for nothing." They initially plan to heat the crematorium before attempting to heat the rest of the town with the smoke produced by the burning corpses... presumably of their former neighbours.

Closer to home, the Redditch Borough Council attempted to heat their municipal swimming pool using the same method in 2011.

However, the funeral director claimed to find the idea "strange and eerie". If the proposal is cleared, the council could save £14,500 annually on its heating bill. Wired.co.uk tried to get in touch with someone from Redditch Council about this, but no one was able to confirm whether the plans went ahead.

Apart from gardening and a passion for ecological responsibility, Wired.co.uk wondered what else inspired Wiigh-Mäsak, "The problem with having a little shop on an island that only has 200 people there during the long winters is that it's totally silent. There weren't people running into the shop for hours sometimes. I thought, what if I'm a lonely lunatic? What if it's only me who sees this? So over two years I started to interview people on a daily basis for 15 minutes. I'd tell them I had an idea and wanted to hear their thoughts. It was amazing; everyone said it was a brilliant

So no backlash at all? "It's the strangest of things. Of all the thousands and thousands of people, I haven't got one email that was in any way negative."

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As cremations are often linked with Christianity, it was surprising there wasn't any disapproval from the church, "The government and the church have always been together in Sweden, but one year before Promessa started, the church and state separated, which was not lucky for the church or for Promessa." Wiigh-Mäsak explains that without a clear leadership, the bishops didn't know how to properly manage the graveyards. The cremation industry, seeing the potential to bolster their business, swooped in and very quickly began unofficially managing the graveyards. "And do you think they wanted to have any new method? No. So they've been struggling, you could say, over the years -- trying to spread rumours about us, trying to take down the importance of creating this new method, they have huge problems with us that they can't solve now and not in the future. They are fighting an impossible war."

Curiouser and curiouser crematoria

An impossible war between two competing body disposal organisations was too intriguing to ignore. Wiigh-Mäsak informed me that there were Swedish "hubs of power" within various crematoria that have specifically targeted her company. I got in touch with The Cemeteries Administration in Stockholm. They responded swiftly: "The Cemeteries Administration in Stockholm is not interested to participate in this matter. Kindly regards." Kindly regards, indeed.

However, a quick phone call to the Swedish Embassy soon connected us with the Federation of Cemeteries and Crematoria of Sweden. Wired.co.uk spoke to two members of their staff, both with similar stories to tell. "It doesn't work." What doesn't? "Promessa. It's in all the newspapers, the idea does not work.

People have been waiting 10 years now." People? You mean the government has been waiting 10 years? "No, dead people. She [ Wiigh-Mäsak] has kept dead people in a freezer for 10 years. They have been waiting for it to start but the technology... it doesn't work. So now the government has said they can't wait any longer, they have to bury them." But if the technology doesn't work, why are there still people waiting to use Promessa? "Because it's in their will and by law that has to be respected." That's a bit odd isn't it? "Yeah, it's really odd. I know in the beginning we wanted to talk to her and maybe collaborate. But now she hasn't any... she can't do it. It's very, very strange that she can still sell what's just an idea, I don't think she's even done it on an animal. If you talk to her though she'll probably tell you something different."

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This completely contradicts the facts Wiigh-Mäsak provided me, but could also confirm her warnings that the crematoria were out to ruin her. I ask them outright, even if they don't believe she can make it, if she DID, would they consider her a threat to their business "No. I don't think so. 77 percent of all Swedes are cremated. I don't think she'll be a threat."

But what about the crematoria's detrimental effects on the environment? Are they not worried they're ecologically immoral, as Wiigh-Mäsak suggests? "I don't think I can answer that. I know we're definitely trying to be greener though and our newer equipment is certainly more efficient than our older ones." The phone cut off. When Wired.co.uk called back a different person answered, who had exactly the same story. Wiigh-Mäsak was in the papers. Her technology doesn't work.

There are dead people in freezers.

An ecological (under)turf war Having heard both sides, it's difficult to know who to completely trust. This article seems to have inadvertently stumbled into a peculiar and entirely unexpected turf war between two distinctly different forms of burial with two distinctly different goals. With no intention of wanting to ruffle either side's feathers, or indeed of picking sides, this is probably the appropriate place to begin our coda.

Humankind has always been caught up in the world in which it finds itself. Lately that intrigue is often expressed in "ecological" terms, revealing an increasingly disproportionate fixation and burgeoning disquiet about the natural world (perhaps because we never quite forget that it is, ultimately, non-human), and an anxiety about what we're doing to it.

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Hearing Wiigh-Mäsak speak, it's difficult not to be drawn to her emphasis on the science or biology of death, coupled with the admittedly pleasing notion that perhaps when we're all finally swept away, we can still contribute to a future we'll never know.

It's reassuring there's (probably) some solid science behind that and that there may be hope yet for a world we've neglected and abused for far too long. If everything Wiigh-Mäsak said is true, there's at least one person at Wired.co.uk who will be looking to be buried the Promessa way.